As organizations, including retailers, increasingly move their operations to the online space, the organization's website is oftentimes seen as an increasingly important public face of the organization. To maintain a fully functional and comprehensive organizational website (such as a retail website) the organization must be able to rapidly change, update and synchronize their website. For database-driven websites, this requires rapid changes and updates to database records associated with the website. However, unlike most brick-and-mortar stores, online stores are often multi-channel, open 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year, making it difficult to perform maintenance and/or test changes to the system. Organizations may prefer to have a staging database or a staging server to assemble, test, and review changes to the organization website before those changes are applied to a production database and thus to the organization's public website. This is oftentimes especially critical for dynamic organizations which have constantly evolving product and service offerings.
Thus, a need exists for systems and methods for propagating the record changes made in a staging database to a production database. Currently, several out-of-the-box products exist to propagate data and record changes from a staging server to a production server, including IBM's Staging Propagation utility currently available from International Business Markers Corp., Armonk, N.Y. and currently available from Oracle Corporation, Redwood City, Calif. However, for larger staging servers that incorporate a large number of records and record changes, the out-of-the-box solutions may become unreliable, prone to errors, and impracticably slow.
While the background systems and methods identified herein generally work for their intended purpose, the subject invention provides improvements thereto, particularly by providing systems and methods propagating data between a staging database to a production database in a flexible, customizable, and efficient manner.